1. Technical Field
Embodiments discussed herein relate generally to integrated electronic capacitive devices and more particularly, but not exclusively, to a tunable liquid crystal device for radio frequency communication.
2. Background Art
Nematic liquid crystals (LCs) have been used as a dielectric material for tunable devices. These materials feature an anisotropic dielectric constant. Applying an electrostatic field across the LC material changes the orientation of the LC molecules, which results in a change of the anisotropic dielectric constant. This functionality is used to realize tunable components such as tunable capacitors, tunable antenna elements and tunable phase shifters.
Variable delay line devices are one example of integrated electronic hardware that has, over the past few years, incorporated nematic liquid crystal as a tunable radio frequency (RF) material. During operation of such a device, an electrical field can be applied to induce an at least partial alignment of polar LC molecules. This alignment results in a change to the permittivity of the LC material, which in turn results in different delay line (or other) characteristics of the device.
As successive generations of integrated electronic devices continue to scale in size and speed, the performance requirements for various applications of such devices continue to become more stringent. As a result, there is expected to be an increasing demand to have tunable electronic mechanisms work in and/or with such faster, smaller or otherwise more efficient next generation integrated electronic devices. However, the industry is beginning to reach limits of existing technologies for operating such tunable resonator devices. For example, in LCD technology, fast switching is obtained mainly by reducing the LC gap size to a few micrometers. However, this option is not available when trying to meet the RF requirements in most applications.